eli5: if you need to put energy to rise the temperature of the substance, why cant you generate energy by cooling something down?
In: 6
You theoretically can, but heat is not useful energy to do work. If you’ve heard of the second law of thermodynamics (over time entropy tends to increase) entropy is a measure of how much energy in a system is no longer useful to do work. If we could capture that energy and use it, that would be great, but we can’t. That’s why when talking about things “losing energy” it’s usually lost as heat.
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